s like a mediaeval saint, with her hair
wound in a crown about her head, her blue gown falling in stately
fold, and her bare feet showing under the hem of her nightgown. In
spite of her seeming calm, her eyes blazed with excitement.

To French she seemed something holy and apart--as if those bare feet
rested on a crescent, and the shadows of the old hall were floating
clouds. He had schooled himself during his hurried journey, in order
to meet her without emotion, but she was her own protection; to have
touched her would have seemed sacrilege. Her lips tried to frame the
question that consumed her with its terrors.

"Simeon----" she began, but her voice failed.

Stephen's haggard eyes softened.

"He is dying," he said. "But there is time--perhaps to-day--perhaps
to-morrow. His force of will has kept him alive to see you--he has
cared more than you knew."

She gave a little sob, and turned toward the staircase. Halfway up she
stopped.

"I forgot to ask you to come in," she said, "or whether you want
anything I can get you? But it doesn't matter, does it? All that
matters is to do Simeon's bidding. I shall be very quick."

In an incredibly short time she was back, fully dressed, and carrying
a bag, into which she had thrust what was indispensable to her comfort
for another day. She waked the servant, left a message for her father,
and then she and Stephen went out into the street, so gay with early
sunlight and twittering birds, so bare of human traffic. At first a
strange shyness kept her dumb; she longed to ask a thousand things,
but the questions that rose to her lips seemed susceptible of
misunderstanding, and Stephen's aloofness frightened her. Did he
think, she wondered, that she could forget her duty to Simeon at such
a moment, that he surrounded himself with this impenetrable reserve?
And all the time he was regarding her with a passionate reverence that
shamed him into silence.

At the railway station their train was waiting--the locomotive hissing
its impatience; they got into the car, for there was but one, and in a
moment were flying seaward. A man--the steward of the yacht--was busy
at the far end of the car with a cooking apparatus, and the aroma of
coffee came intoxicatingly to her nostrils. She remembered she had
eaten nothing since her early dinner the day before, and she was
exhausted with excitement, and then she despised herself for thinking
of her physical needs when Simeon lay dying. It was